Beer with Havel, Part Three

So where did the playwright-essayist-poet-dissident and first President of the CzechRepublic come in? Rachel’s predilection for molding minds never faded, nor did her taste for adventure. Ten years after she was unceremoniously prodded out of teaching in the New York City public school system- carted away as it were kicking and screaming because of a mandatory retirement age of seventy- she happened on a new opportunity that trumped even some of her previous madcap flings. After she was forced out of the job she remained in the city for a couple of years, did a bit of traveling to the usual places, spoke nostalgically of having done the fox trot with a hulking and totally charming Irishman she met in the lounge of one of the hotels but she eventually relocated to the college town that housed the Ivy where her son-in-law was a professor. True to form, she did not fall into the placid way of reading novels and munching bonbons but quickly became involved in tutoring adults learning English as a second language. This newfound way of being kept her occupied for a number of years, and when I visited I noticed that her digs, though smaller and simpler in style, still had her unmistakable mark with a huge and rather wild oil of vaguely Jackson Pollack-ish demeanor covering the better part of a wall, and a stack of the latest reads in hardcover sitting slightly askew on an end table, waiting for her attention. Between her intermittent visits back to the city- which created small bouts of cyclonic activity that usually left me dazed and enervated- along with her dozens of new friends and interesting teaching gig, for a while she seemed quite content. Around her eightieth birthday however she finally surrendered to the urge of creating some real excitement by enlisting in a program through something like the Peace Corps that ultimately sent her and all of her eight decades to Czechoslovakia. Apparently a few of her adult students were from the region and had piqued her interest. Glasnost was still in its childhood, tourists were not hitting the spot in droves yet, and to this inveterate arm chair wanderer the idea seemed quite exotic. Though not a great traveler myself, a passing acquaintance with the narratives of Kundera had me picturing cool Slav hipsters clad in black on black who were intensely interested in the unbearable lightness of being and other existential conundrums of the late twentieth century, abstract conflicts which though I did not entirely understand, I admired. She applied for admission, and during the screening process Rachel was advised that among her application requirements she would have to submit to an HIV blood test; as she recounted the story later, her response to the screeners was that she was “truly flattered;” needless to say, she passed the interview with flying colors and the laughs were thrown in free of charge. Vaclav Havel was the Big Thing in the news in those times with everyone who had even a vague interest in theater or politics or both scooping up his biography, and naturally she managed to make contact with the colorful artist turned politician himself. When she returned after about six or seven months with tales of stark conditions, spartan accommodations, bad food and the pervasive nicotine addiction of Eastern Europeans, she said these small inconveniences, annoying though they could be, were nicely tempered by having gotten to hang out in some dark, smoky, former Eastern bloc beer joint with the legendary leader of the Czech political avant-garde, swilling hops and talking about god knows what; needless to say, he was “wonderful” and “electrifying,” with “a great sense of humor” and yet “down to earth. . . .”

Beer with Havel, Part Two

Of course I was not Rachel, nor could I ever hope to be. Her beloved husband Harry- a mild-mannered retired businessman of mini stature and grand manners had been filling the Number Two slot for many years after a brief, disastrous union earlier in her youth. Unfortunately he had a stroke in later life (Harry had at least twenty on Rachel), and as soon as he could stand she began hauling him off to Sunday afternoon tea dances at Windows on the World. He was just ambulatory enough to allow himself to be glided around the snazzy observation deck of a dance floor in the carefree decades before 9/11 and the moment in history was not lost on Rachel. Had I ever had to face a similar situation I probably would have sought out every pop and self help book on the vagaries of destiny and neuroscience I could find and then spent the rest of my energy railing against the unfairness of things. Luckily I was trying to get out of a failing marriage of my own at the time so the idea of healing the infirm through fancy stepping was a kind of a moot point anyway, but still something to tuck away for later should the need arise. It was all about motion for Rachel and in the peacefully catatonic years prior to both the internet and the sudden, ubiquitous onslaught of women tri-athletes, she also proved that movement was indeed life by frequently walking the proverbial three or four miles over hill and dale to her high school English teaching job when the weather “permitted.” Once arrived, she would jar awake the pre-conscious awarenesses of thirty or so sleepy adolescent minds, catapulting them out of their collective swoon by relentlessly peppering them with insanely thought provoking questions about heroes and villains at the intensely thought provoking hour of eight in the morning, or to be more precise, at exactly seventeen minutes after eight when the late bell rang. But her penchant for mobility stopped short of ever letting herself resemble a sweat drenched alley cat of a jogger during her bouts of self-inflicted cardio. You would never catch her in one of those strange, unflattering get-ups for runners and other compulsive exercisers that now serve as familiar badges for the burgeoning movement trade. She had a passion for hip, arty outfits fashioned out of intricately woven fabric that you find only in expensive boutiques and managed to conjure up all sorts of colorful, teeny sized ensembles in the most stylish manner before there was a real selection of petite sized clothing available for petite sized adults, that is, short (no pun) of having to shop in the children’s department; it was still a time when smaller women basically had to make do with endless bouts of alteration lest they wind up with comically long sleeves,  pants legs that dragged, or worse, rolled; however she somehow managed to finesse these ripples without winding up looking like a kid parading around in her mother’s pinned up dresses for Halloween. Her one concession to practicality was the sensible shoes she clomped around in for the many miles of hoofing it. I was still wearing jeans and clogs back then, more than occasionally rolling the cuffs and thinking that exercise was overrated, a fad.

While Rachel was still in her late sixties and seeming older than the hills to a woman not yet forty though already dreading the day, I once asked her if she ever thought about death, and if so, specifically what she thought about it; we were in Bloomingdales and I can still see us standing at one of the many beauty counters splattering and immersing ourselves in all sorts of densely aromatic samples with particularly careless abandon, when the question came up. Skipping barely a half beat, she looked aloft to the recessed lighting that so flattered the mannequins as well as the shoppers and said with certainty that there was no point in thinking about this since she would not be aware of what was going on in the world anyway. This theory of course eventually would lead to the natural conclusion that one must live life as if each day were the last, a thought more unsettling than death itself; but at a less radical level of consideration it still offered food for thought. I had been obsessing about mortality since my first brush with a felled pigeon back in kindergarten, and zillions of hours spent reading novels since had done not much to dispel the thoughts, though it did drastically increase the strength of my lens prescription each year. And although she read far into the night with the best of them and consumed as many words if not more than the geekiest of geeks or most cozily contented and battened down of bookworms-  and not just fiction but non-fiction and biography too- Rachel did not seem to require eyeglasses. Her one anatomical failing, or that which bothered her most intensely about her mortal coil as she called it- a favorite line from the play she loved to teach- centered around her hands and feet- she positively hated her fingers- and this visceral antipathy to her own digits led her to having her hammer toes surgically corrected, though she normally avoided going to doctors even for a checkup. She appeared in school one day after a brief absence wearing those weird, splint-like things that look like snow shoes with bandages and said that if breaking a few bones meant she could  finally look good in sandals- a lifelong dream apparently- then it was well worth it. Was she vain? Not in the usual way; she had lots of wrinkles and wore her completely gray hair cut short and uncomplicatedly, in a style befitting the most mythical of chocolate-chip-cookie-baking grannies from the Midwest; it was all about the earrings, naturally. That, and the slightly Brooklyn accent. . . .

Beer with Havel

Rachel had thirty years or so on me, give or take a month, but when I was not yet forty I could barely keep up with her. A typical whirlwind jaunt through the upper west side- sometimes after a full six hour and twenty minute day of grappling with a barrel of exploding hormones in a high school English class- might very well involve checking out any number of boutiques and book stores where we undressed and redressed at lightning speed and thumbed through myriad novels, stopping to speak with random strangers on the street as we went, then grabbing a quick snack of arroz con pollo in some postage stamp of a Cuban Chinese eatery to fuel our further wanderings before we careened back up the West Side Highway in one of her newly acquired second hand Volvos, which she frequently insisted I drive because that was the one thing she really hated.

I met her in the laundry room of the building in which we both lived  and she began talking about authors as if we were old friends who simply were in the middle of a conversation we’d been having for hours. I was hooked. She was barely five feet tall with a gravelly, knowing voice and the proverbial piercing, sea blue eyes set in a face straight out of a Russian shtetl, from whence it turns out she actually had arrived nearly seven decades earlier at the tender age of barely toddlerdom, back in the glory days before WWI. Her impeccable diction and intonation belied these infant immigrant roots and emanated straight from the universe of FDR, where the only theng to feeah was feeah itself. She was a tiny and well read presence of great importance and in a word, authoritative. She also had a dry and potent sense of humor of the caustic type, a scarily discriminating eye and a hugely capitalized Gusto for life. In no time at all she became my role model. I wanted to be Rachel when I grew up and old, and go anything but gentle into the good night.

Non Ode to Winter

I think therefore I am, I am

I think I think therefore I can

Can what? Can do, can be, can am!

Green eggs & ham?

I never touch it-

If truth be told,

Don’t think much of it.

Before too long I’ll be a loon

If the #@***#! sun does not show soon.

In a real short while I won’t be fine

Unless that blazing orb does shine.

Apollo, Hyperion & all you Phoebes

Shoot thy rays on my heebie jeebies

And please forgive this verbal mush

I’m just so sick of snow and slush

It’s near impossible to pass the lanes

My boots ache and a drowsy numbness pains. . . .